


an atlas of stars

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, M/M, YOI Space Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-24 00:05:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13799190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: "Humans are just love and stardust," quotes Yuuri."Not just," says Victor. They're betweens systems, now, traversing through a pocket of deep and dazzling darkness.Yuuri looks at him and a smile crinkles the corners of his eyes. It's a tiny difference, this. And yet tiny differences everywhere in all of space and time are the only reason they're standing next to each other now.(a series of inter-connected shorts, written for yoi space week)





	1. one: nebulae

_**Day One.**  nebulae - vague, conceptual, dreamlike. full of potential and what might be, swirling with the hopes and dreams of stars yet to be born._

  


_And in the end_  
_I will seek you_  
 _Out amongst_  
 _The stars._  
  
_The space dust_  
 _Of me will_  
 _Whisper_  
 _‘I love you’._  
  
_Into the infinity_  
 _Of the universe._

\- David Jones, _Love and Space Dust  
_

 

He first thinks of himself in a place that is big and blank and dark. He thinks, and realizes with a start,  _I exist,_ and beyond that revelation there are thousands of others, new concepts and words that ripple across the infinite nothingness. For a brief time, cataloguing himself is enough: he thinks he is a good thing, clever and quick, and all of the first words are also good things that rattle around the void.

 

Void is the first neutral word, the first thing he thinks of that has a bit of an edge. He does yet know what it means that some things might cut because there is nothing, nothing here like physical harm. After void comes  _alone_ and when he discovers that he is singular, he learns an entire host of new things. These are  _feelings._ He tools around an infinite emptiness — beautiful, but empty — and he is sad and alone.

 

He thinks about it for a very long time.

 

And then he invents the word  _friend._

 

What he invents is something else entirely: it is a bubbling, bursting set of impulses; it has enthusiasm, it is eager to do his bidding. Its thoughts are not as discernible as his; its mind is not as sharp. He begins to think of it affectionately as a beast, and it responds to his praise with surges of happiness and pride.

 

He wonders: _what else could I make?_

 

It takes longer than it should, maybe. This interim period. He wants to make sure he gets it right. But soon enough there is a sense of space, which he and the beast walk through, and with space comes time, and soon he’s contemplating building blocks and elements and before he knows it the Beast has made a mess of all of his star stuff, scattering nebulae haphazardly through the sky. He’d had his own plan, of course, something of an architect’s touch, evenly distributed, but this organic smear has a beauty all its own and anyway it’s too beautiful now to disrupt.

 

For a while he’s so taken with them that he sets his mind to nothing else. He sits with the Beast, and while he watches the stars form, he wonders:  _Is this going to be all that there is?_

 

It wouldn’t be terrible, a life with the Beast.

 

Life! Oh, what a word that is. He bubbles and simmers with possibility and so does the glimmering universe. The stars take shape, and planets, too, and it takes several billion tries before he thinks he’s got it figured out. Not that it matters: he has the time. He has so much time. He realizes, one day, that he is surrounded by things. Beautiful, wonderful Things and the Beast. He and the Beast have thoughts and personalities of their own. He hesitates on the brink of this thought, and then he says,  _yes._ He names what he and the Beast have a  _soul,_ and he carves up little pieces of it, imbues it everywhere.

 

He thinks of the unending affection he has for the Beast and decides he wants more of whatever that is. But he’s afraid to put a name to it by himself. It seems important, this. He can take eons if he has to, to name it.

 

The first thing to speak back to him — Beast never does — is a tiny star, coming to life in a nebulae. He’s been visiting this place often, has the sense that something magical is about to happen. Whenever he’s there he feels like he’s being watched, which is a strange, foreign sensation. After all,  _he_  is the watcher.

 

 _… Hello?_  He tries. The star shrinks back, makes itself smaller.  _Don’t do that! Please …_

 

Then:  _… hello. I’m sorry to … have bothered you._

 

 _You could never be a bother,_ he swears. And he means no offense to Beast, who is lovely and wonderful, but his conversations with Beast are remarkably one-sided. He thinks, and the Beast sends him affection like bubbles, comforts him, but they have never spoken. The star seems unaware of its beauty, twisting in the nebula, pulling itself together; insists that the really majestic thing is him, formless and shapeless in all of the vastness of space.

 

_Doesn’t all of this exist because of you?_

 

 _Maybe._ If he hadn’t come along, perhaps something else would have? It’s a strange possibility to think about. Maybe there are other places like this, infinite ones, with infinite watchers, each of them different.  _I just got it started. Me and the Beast. But now it …_

 

Now things just sort of operate.

 

It’s the first time that he thinks he could leave and whatever this is — it would keep going.

 

The star takes its shape and assumes a brilliant position in the night sky; dances in wonderful spirals through its solar system, its galaxy. Other voices bubble across the universe, and the watcher attends to them, wanders, marvels as they do the things he did: they think and they create, in their own ways, some of them differently than others.

 

Time is nothing to him, but a lot of it passes, and he’s getting more distracted by the details. There are planets that sing now, little pieces of rock and element that have each made their stars the center of their universe. The planets have a smaller frame of understanding of the universe than the stars and the galaxies; they feel young and they are fascinated by themselves. On the planets other creatures brim, and at each layer he realizes the frame of consciousness is so small. He watches a creature stand on a planet and look up at the sky, only a fraction of the things he knows about, and call it  _infinite._ It makes him a little sad. So he does what he always does. He and the Beast go and visit the Star.

 

Some of the planets and some of the stars are quite intrepid with this whole  _life_ thing, and he’s fascinated to watch as civilizations rise, as some of the creatures learn to recognize themselves and then form orders amongst themselves.

 

He sees, between them, the thing he’s afraid to give a name. He tells the Star all of these things that he sees. He explains the way the creatures are starting to form clans and tribes, describes a mother’s birth, a father’s pride.  _You sound wistful,_ says the Star.

 

 _It’s interesting,_ he says back, and if he had a body the way the creatures did, he knows he’d be kicking at stones.  _The things they do. The way they bind to each other. Have you ever thought about it?_

 

 _I think about it all the time,_ the Star tells him, and then it rushes to contain several arcs of solar flares and hums what must be its millionth apology, after all this time.

 

Death almost breaks him. The first of the stars implodes on itself and even Beast can’t cheer him up. He must have made a mistake, thinking of all of these things. The star makes him notice it everywhere: on the planets, especially, there is an endless cycle of it, and on the one hand while he can appreciate the cosmic neatness of it, the preservation of matter, what he doesn’t understand is the way the world keeps going on, the way the loss of the prey to the predator seems to mean very little once the moment of death has passed.

 

He realizes the Star is going to die one day and the thought fills him with something he’s never known before: unique dread and fierce, fierce terror.  _Aren’t you afraid,_ he asks the Star, which is more or less his way of saying  _I am afraid for you._

 

 _… A little,_ the Star admits.  _And sad about what gets left behind, and what it means for my planets. But everything comes back eventually, here. Don’t you know that?_

 

 _I don’t,_ he admits, because he doesn’t. He supposes he had a beginning, but he doesn’t know the end.

 

 _Well,_ says the Star, carefully, and his attention drifts to each of the eleven planets that chirp and orbit him, some close and familiar, some at a great distance. The last three are all almost uniform in size, and they’re terribly young things, with simple, cheerful hearts.  _… Think about it._

 

He tries to think about it. He does. Except one of the cultures on one of the planets subsequently invents War, and it undoes him, sends him back to the Star. The Beast follows, and tries, but he’s broken down in some way the Beast can’t fix.

 

 _It was a mistake. It must have been. Someone better could have avoided all of this, I know it._ Some other primordial thing, in some other pocket universe has created a place where nothing dies and where no one suffers, he thinks. It is because of his flaws that these things are here now, he decides. Because of his little whimsies and his little hopes and the way he’d wanted anything but to be alone.

 

For a while, the Star is silent. Then:

 

_… Was all of it a mistake?_

 

He realizes, as soon as the question is asked, that he has an answer that is so impetuous that it proves how unfit for his task he is.  _You aren’t._ And Beast is not a mistake, either, Beast who scattered stardust through the universe, who cast the foundations for  _everything_  with the same glee with which some of the creatures run through fields on some of the planets he’s seen. All around them, new places are constantly springing into life and death in ways that he never could have predicted. Every day in the universe is a new surprise.

 

 _I think I would love them differently if I knew we’d have forever,_ the Star murmurs back.  _Almost like taking them for granted._

 

 _Love_? Love! He examines this word in silence, would walk around it if he could, and realizes that the Star has just easily given a name to this thing that shimmers between the elements, the little bits and pieces that connect the universe with invisible strings. It is an incredibly powerful word. And he understands at once the way, because of its power, it can be twisted, abused. He understands the lengths others might go to for its magic.

 

Would he still love the star if he knew the star might go on forever?

 

 _It amazes me that you still don’t understand it,_ says the Star.

 

_Why?_

 

 _Because you’re you._ Says the Star, who sends him to look at his fourth planet, where there grows a beautiful flower that only blooms for a single rotation cycle: only once, as it faces the Star’s warmth. Whatever the Star is attempting to get him to comprehend, he knows he doesn’t yet, and so the Star sends him to other places: to a black hole at the center of a galaxy, to a planet recently pock-marked by the collision of an asteroid, still there but different, now, than it was before.

 

He comes back and the Star is different in the way that all Stars are, as they start to burn out.  _Oh. No no no no._ He can think of something. He’s clever, isn’t he? He will find a way.

 

_What are you doing?_

 

_I’m going to make sure you can still shine. I — This is my fault, it’s my responsibility …_

 

The Star is silent for a very long time.  _This is who I am, I think._

 

_But you can’t —_

 

_Why not?_

 

 _Because I love you!_ It is a fact he has never admitted to the Star. That he’s watched from the very beginning, that he’s been captivated and enchanted and that it is very, very difficult to imagine eons passing by without him to talk to.

 

 _… But wouldn’t you want me to be myself?_ The Star asks, very quietly. It’s a stunning reprimand. He lets it rattle him.

 

_That’s all I’ve ever wanted._

 

The Star examines the rest of the universe, the parts of it he can see, at least, from here. It’s all humming along like clockwork.

 

 _Come with me,_ it says.  _Come with me to wherever I’m going next._

 

Without him, stars will burst to life and fall apart, planets will form, civilizations will rise and fall. In a strange way, creation is happening without him, now. He is no longer needed here.

 

_I’m not sure I can._

 

 _Nonsense,_ scoffs the Star.  _You had a beginning._

 

_… So I can have an end?_

 

 _Nothing ends here._ It strikes him again, that thing he once thought of as brutal and inelegant, the conservation of matter.  _At least not like you think._

 

_… I’ll try it._

 

 _Good,_ says the Star.  _Next time, maybe I’ll be the one who finds you._

 

He stays with the Star as the Star slowly cycles out of fuel, falls in on itself, and in that single moment, swifter than the blinking of an eye: he sends the essence of himself back out into the clockwork of the galaxy, entrusts himself to this machine he’s made.

 

The Beast follows, because it is a very loyal Beast, the best, and without them both the whole of the universe twinkles on.

 

 

* * * 

 

 

One day Victor Nikiforov wakes up in his bed after the strangest dream.

 

Next to him, Yuuri Katsuki radiates heat, and across his shoulders there are freckles from too many days on the beach in his childhood, scattered like constellations, one of many things Victor loves to kiss. They are millions of miles from earth, and they’ve been to other beaches since, but this is different, these are pock-marks of sun damage that Yuuri hates. Victor loves it, because it is a tangible mark of the place that is Yuuri’s home, and because he’d never even seen a beach until he was twenty-one, staring out at the pacific in absolute shock, spellbound by its never-ending blue. Water had once been a precious commodity of the Mir II biosphere, and, even after the re-engineering of the condenser system after all of the modernization efforts, Victor had still only ever seen the lake in the botanic gardens, forever overcrowded with Martians like him trying to soak up these little hints of their original home.   


Back to Yuuri’s constellation of freckles: Victor kisses the map they make across Yuuri’s shoulders now, then works his way down his spine, muttering petnames as he goes:  _my star, my gold._

 

Yuuri stirs in his arms, and blinks away sleep. “… Vitya?”

 

“ _Solnyshko_ ,” Victor purrs.

 

There is a wall in their quarters which is meant to create the impression of a window, and over it, sheer curtains, and together they give off a dusky hue, the way Victor remembers the hours before dawn being like. He knows it’s a programmed system, one of the many ways the ship tries to make people feel at home, knows it also reinforces shifts and sleep schedules. Out in space, the word  _morning_ has no meaning. And yet: “… It’s so early.”

 

“I had a strange dream,” Victor hums into Yuuri’s hair, pulling him closer. Yuuri knows by now that Victor has strange dreams all the time; he’s a font of ideas. For years those things made him successful, and then they chained him down, and then Yuuri came along, and set him free of any obligation to them. Already the dream’s details are slipping away from him; in just three more seconds, it will be forgotten entirely, and he will never know if he was the Primordial, or if he was the Star. “Do you think we live more than once?”

 

“I do,” grunts Yuuri, who is also used to answering these kinds of questions, whenever Victor’s whimsy dictates he ask them. It’s a surprising answer from one of the ship’s science officers, since there’s no real evidence for their consciousness together, even now, no proof of its meaning or even any hope for a lasting effect. He must know that his answer is only going to create other questions, because he turns over, rolling into Victor’s chest, hiding his face from the morning light, and mutters: “… but I think it’s only ever this life that matters.”

 

“Yuuri,” Victor whines, because sometimes Yuuri is the least helpful person on earth, even if he is especially beautiful when there’s subtle streaks of light coming in through the curtains and his hair is tousled from sleep and his lashes lie long and still over his cheekbones. Victor kisses the top of his head because it feels like the sort of thing he ought to do in response, a retaliation for Yuuri’s casual, accidental beauty, and the mayhem it does in the chambers of Victor’s heart. He is, no doubt, not the first person to invent vindictive, sulky kisses like this, but to him they still feel new.

 

“Vitya,” Yuuri says. He doesn’t say  _I love you_ very often, has a strange relationship with the word, somehow. When he does it’s always in an impetuous burst, with all the shock and surprise of every sunrise. What he says instead is Victor’s name, and he’s the only one who says it exactly  _that way._ “I’m going back to sleep now,” he adds, which implies that Victor should too.

 

Victor doesn’t. He stays awake. He watches.


	2. two: stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a note to say: the tense changes are deliberate, henceforth. onwards!

_**Day Two.** stars - burning bright, beautiful, and bold. they are young, they are carefree, they burn and light up the night and bring warmth and life._

 

 _Perhaps we were_  
_Born in the same star._  
_I can feel the space_  
 _Dust in my soul_  
 _Hauling us together._

\- David Jones,  _Love and Space Dust_

 

Enlisting in the academy was Georgi’s idea.

 

“C’mon. Everyone knows this colony’s been a dead-end ever since engineering stabilized the magnetic fields necessary for FTL travel. Don’t you want to get out of here, Vitya?”

 

“Sure,” Victor hummed. “Doesn’t everyone? But you know they’re going to take one look at our passports: _oh. Martians. And you’re from Mir II? I hear the janitors are hiring …_ ”

 

“With your legacy? And those scores? I don’t think so.”

 

Victor doesn’t say it, but he’s tired of hearing about his legacy. Commander Alexei Nikiforov lead the first crew of colonists out to Mir II, and it had been his ingenuity who’d kept them alive during that first season of one technical malfunction after the next. Victor’s grandfather lost a limb to frostbite, and still hustles across Mir II causeways like he commands the place, though he’s been retired for decades.

 

They don’t talk too much about Victor’s father, who found the burden of heroism too much to bear, and who lurks around in Maintenance sometimes still, burning paychecks on bad Martian moonshine and interstellar gambling rings. Victor’s mother hadn’t even bothered to keep the house: a pragmatic woman, she’d packed their things and marched a half-mile to Alexei’s doorstep. _We’re moving in, old man. You don’t have anything better to do and it’ll be good for your grandson._

 

He has no grandparents on his mother’s side. The Mars colonies have had some hard years. Only this latest generation — people like Victor and Georgi — have known what it is to grow up mostly free of hazard.

 

In the end, he’d agreed: not, like Georgi, out of any sort of idealism, but because he’d been at the end of a series of fizzled-out relationships and he didn’t have a better idea, at least not one that didn’t involve also exploring the bottom of a bottle. Victor felt more exhausted than he had any right to be at his age: tired of the same old faces with the same old stories. Most of Mir II’s residents were like him and Georgi, the grandchildren or even great-grandchildren of the original colonists, and Victor was beginning to find the entire narrative predictable. The last time he’d been surprised — _really_ surprised that was, because the discovery of a frozen-over valve or another shop all sold-out of earthware didn’t count — had been a meteor shower he’d forgotten was even going to happen, in spite of the centrally programmed calendar. The biodome dimmed, growing increasingly translucent, until all that lingered above was Mars’ thin atmosphere and the streak of starlight across the night sky.

 

It was beautiful out there. On a space colony, especially this one, most things were functional. Everything around him was boxy and efficient. The stars twinkled overhead in defiance of the utilitarianism of life on a colony, artlessly graceful, strangely familiar.

 

If he was honest with himself, _home_ felt like it may very well have been _out there._

 

Besides, Victor’s grandfather still kept carefully preserved postcards and photos from earth, and they always made Victor wonder what it might be like, to walk outside without a suit, barefoot in the sand. _If nothing else, I’ll see the ocean._

 

His mother cut his hair the day before they left.

 

Earth, it turned out, was nothing like Victor expected.

 

* * *

 

Georgi stood beside him, motionless. “Victor,” he whispered, as Earth steadily grew larger, in front of the shuttle.

 

Funny: he’d always seen it in pictures, this blue-green marble, slowly twirling its way through space. “I know,” Victor whispered, and the two of them said nothing else. _It’s beautiful._

 

The first thing he noticed about earth is how _heavy_ he felt, stepping slowly and carefully off the ship. The enlistment officers had warned Victor and Georgi both about the transition, assigning them special, weighted clothes in preparation for the trip back to the motherland and insisting on hours upon hours spent inside of a gravity simulator. Even that could not have prepared Victor for how slow he moved, wrangling his pack off the ship to get into line with the other recruits. Overhead the sun was bright in a way that even the artificial lights of the Mir II biosphere couldn’t replicate. He knew not to look at it, of course, but it was hard to resist. Georgi didn’t bother - he took a pair of solar lenses out of his coat pocket, put them on, and whistled under his breath.

 

Then the second passed, and any further reconciling with the strange, brutal beauty of the earth was put aside while a senior member of Academy staff barked out their next round of instructions:

 

“Each of you should have been issued a com-link device. Roommate assignments have just been posted. Gather your belongings and get checked in. Dinner is at 18:00, lights out at 22:00. First call tomorrow is at 06:00. I don’t care what kind of inter-stellar jetlag you might be facing, if you’re not at the 06:00 call, you will do doubles in your physicals for the whole week. Space does not wait for your body. Understood?”

 

_Understood._

 

Victor and Georgi’s wristbands chirped in time, and he thumbed over the screen. _#541 Giacometti, C; Nikiforov, V; Popovich, G._

 

They discovered _Giacometti, C_ already in the room upon arrival — a lanky, bronzed figure in thin, round glasses, already scrolling through something on a tablet as he lounged on the room’s only solitary bed. Victor bit back a caustic remark about the arrangement while Georgi inspected the pair of bunks that remained. “Bottom,” he grunted, and Victor didn’t have to ponder his strange decision for too long: Georgi threw his bag on the lower bunk, and then collapsed into it.

 

Victor grumbled something impolite as he hefted his bag up the ladder, and was pleasantly surprised when Christophe jumped up to help him put his things away.

 

“I’m guessing you’re not natives, huh?”

 

“What clued you in? The pasty complexions or the leading indicators that gravity’s going to kill us before the week’s out?”

 

“Now, now. Where I come from, we call this _making smalltalk until I figure out which one of you to hit on…_ ”

 

Georgi and Victor’s answers were practically instantaneous:

 

“Hit on Georgi, it’ll be funnier —“

 

“ — Hit on Victor, he might actually take you up on it —“

 

Victor couldn’t possibly have known it then, but this was, as the earthlings liked to say, the start of a beautiful friendship.

 

* * *

 

Georgi is proven right, in a way: their aptitude scores send each of them into slightly different flights — Georgi goes into Engineering, and Christophe into Navigation, and Victor? Victor goes into a flight simulator for the first time that year. Earth orbits the sun one more time and he’s on his first guided flight. He can’t imagine doing anything else. _Geez, you’re a natural._

 

Then one day he makes the Hygiea run — his first solo flight, a test jump from earth to the asteroid belt and back, in a vessel only additionally manned by an android meant to course correct in the event of pilot failure. He sets a course that leaves the previous records for speed and accuracy behind, and which brings his ship back in pristine condition.

 

 _How do you feel about the Expedition division,_ someone asks, and it’s the hardest thing Victor’s ever done, a few years later, agreeing to leave Earth again — perfect, incandescently beautiful blue marble that it is. Who knows when he’ll see an ocean again, or seagulls, or a winter landscape in the woods during a week long survival training.

 

He hesitates for a moment, considers. What subsequent years have shown Victor is that he’s the best pilot in the Academy, period, might be primed to be the best in the entire fleet. He thinks about Christophe and Georgi — Georgi’s got a new girlfriend he’s getting serious with now, which is good news, after the Anya debacle of their second year — taps a finger on his mouth. “Fine. But I want Giacometti.”

 

“Giacometti already accepted,” his superior officer deadpans. “He asked for you.”

 

Victor graduates with special honors: top of his class in an unheard-of _three_ distinct disciplines, holder of practically every flight record the school possesses along with a significant number of others in a host of different exams.

 

Among the hundreds of other cadets watching as Victor crosses the stage and shakes hands with the Chancellor is a young man finishing up his very first year. Yuuri Katsuki breaks out into a nervous sweat every time they put him in the pilot seat, but he’s determined to make it up in his science scores. _Heard he and Giacometti got their pick of assignments,_ someone near him says. _They went Expedition division, of course._

 

On stage, Victor turns and smiles for the cameras. A smile like that makes it easy to understand why there have always been stories about stars personified, crashing out of the heavens. Yuuri’s seen the studies about colonization and exposure, read about subtle changes in the human genome just after a handful of generations. Victor has all the brilliance of Sirius, but he moves through the academy like he’s Polaris instead: everyone else uses him to measure up, to chart their course.

 

Yuuri is the only one who notices that no family members have stood up to take pictures personally, and catches himself thinking about the incredible paradox of someone shining both brilliantly, and alone, before he hears someone nearby whispering to another cadet. _It’ll be years before we get another one like him._

 

 _Maybe,_ the treacherous parts of Yuuri hum back in response, all the little pieces that dare to dream, that reach past the chokehold of his own anxiety for something bigger, something meaningful. _Maybe not._

 

Graduation proceeds in a boring, formal way after that, and Yuuri’s mind wanders. He thinks about how solar systems like this one are anchored by stars, and the way the planets twine around them, and the way that humans have looked up at them for years and felt both inspired and small, all at the same time. He feels that way about Victor, too beautiful and too talented to be properly human. Yuuri always feels a deep familiarity when he stargazes, and even though he hates the way his skin burns and freckles, he’s never shied away from sunshine. Hasetsu’s coast on a summer day has always offered him something like the sun’s soft embrace: wafting, twining heat, kept at a safe distance.

 

There is no safe distance from which to observe Victor Nikiforov. Which begs the question. Yuuri is a budding scientist, after all, and he knows that every massive galaxy rotates around the impenetrable gravity that is a supermassive black hole. At the center of the Milky Way, a seed must have been planted long ago; a collapsed star that gradually gathered others into its inescapable heart.

 

He understands that the real forces of the universe are actually unseen.

 

Like matter itself, Yuuri has both a material, observable face, and a puzzling, paradoxical one.

 

In the hidden dark of his soul, there is a tiny space where he’s honest with himself, uses that word that’s so complicated.

 

It never escapes the event horizon of his own anxiety.

 

When it’s Yuuri’s turn to graduate, having completed an incredibly well-received thesis on the possibilities for life on at least six other planets in nearby systems, and with perfect marks in his physics, chemistry, and biology exams, Yuuri does not get his pick of assignments. But he comes very, very close: central command tells him that he is headed to the space station _Destiny,_ which has only been complete for half a year and is equipped with a laboratory that’s state of the art. He bows politely when he accepts his orders. If he’s thinking about how _Destiny_ is the space station that most of the Expedition division ships return to for fuel and to drop off samples, and how _Terra Incognita_ is the newest Expedition ship, and how it’s piloted by Victor Nikiforov, who has made a name for himself by barely adhering to regulations while he zips across the galaxy and makes astonishing discoveries, well, it doesn’t show.

 

The rest, as they say, is history.


	3. three: galaxies

_**Day Three.** galaxies - communities of stars, drifting through the sky together. perhaps it is humbling to be part of something larger. perhaps it is lonely._

 

 

_Those eyes of yours_  
_Could swallow stars,_  
_Galaxies and universes._

_What hope did I_  
_Ever have?_

\- David Jones, _Love and Space Dust_

 

  
Yuuri Katsuki was the first person from Hasetsu to even make it into the academy; after a city-wide sendoff, he traveled by hyperloop to Tokyo and then across the Pacific on a shuttle carrying fifteen other recruits. It burst over the ocean at Mach 3, quick as a bullet, and Yuuri still remembers what it was like to keep his eyes locked on anything but the shatterproof windows as they cruised over a seemingly endless mix of blue and clouds. He met Phichit Chulanont on that flight, equally proud to be the first candidate for training at central command from Thailand, whooping in glee as they lifted off and then gathered incredible speed. “Are you okay?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“I just wanna make sure you’re not gonna puke.” Phichit had one of those smiles that only pretended to be innocent, belied by the mischief in his eyes, the restless, impossible energy of tachyons. “I’m Phichit.”

 

“Yuuri.” Not even one day in and already someone was worried he wasn’t going to cut it. Well, Phichit could take a number, could file in line behind a hundred other editions of Yuuri. Yuuri very much doubted Phichit would have some new variation of inadequacy to offer that Yuuri that he hadn’t already considered himself. “I’m not going to puke.”

 

“Well, if you change your mind, just say the word and I’ll hold back your hair.” Which was, all things considered, a surprisingly nice offer.

 

He didn’t puke. Good thing, too, when roommate assignments came out after their arrival: _#143 Bin, C; Chulanont, P; Katsuki, Y._

 

Overhead, a squadron of interceptors zipped through mock-combat. The academy had always insisted on dogfighting drills, just in case of hostiles, even with no evidence to support the likelihood of their existence. Yuuri’s steps slowed, and gradually stalled out entirely, as he stopped to watch the graceful interplay of the ships. One of them pulled up sharply, executing a twisting, corked loop that must have been just barely within the machine’s limits.

 

It worked _perfectly_.

 

Next to him, taking a video on his newly issued commlink, Phichit whistled. “That’s one hell of a pilot.”

 

“It’s Nikiforov,” a passing cadet remarked dryly. _Nikiforov, as in Alexei Nikiforov?_ “Showing off again.”

 

* * *

 

 _Nikiforov_ turned out to be the name of an upperclassman it seemed like everyone knew, a pilot whose name routinely appeared at the top of every simulator score. Yuuri’s piloting scores were passable, by compare, the sort of marks that tended to get people stationed on transports if they really insisted on a career spent in flight. Except Yuuri was far more interested in _what_ the pilots brought back from their far-flung journeys into the outer reach. Still, there was a kind of fame that followed the top pilots, some fusion of thrill, celebrity, and expectation. “Doesn’t it kind of make you wonder if he’ll ever perfect-score the sim?”

 

Phichit didn’t even look up from his notes on FTL travel. “Yuuri, your Victor Nikiforov crush is showing again.”

 

“I do not have a Victor Nikiforov crush.”

 

“It’s okay. We’ve all been there.”

 

At the end of that year, though, Victor Nikiforov graduated, and central command sent him millions of miles away, putting any possible feelings Yuuri may or may not have had about him into Schrodinger’s box: theoretical, unobservable, _pointless_.

 

* * *

 

It turned out to be fortunate that Yuuri did most of the arguing for his research clearance digitally, instead of face to face: _I just think if I’m going to be deriving a probability algorithm for systems that can sustain life, I ought to have access to the latest reports from Expedition division. More accurate data will help me refine the thesis, and then everyone will benefit._ Several interviews followed, of course, but gradually he began to receive reports from the six explorer ships scattered around the galaxy, spent his free time reading briefs from the crew and listening to their reports. Periodically, these came in from _Terra Incognita,_ and even more infrequently, the mission reports themselves were recorded by Victor Nikiforov, who always spoke as though he was talking to a friend, or narrating a story. He had a way of making even complicated pieces of astrophysics sound like art. Even over a digital feed, recorded and transmitted over millions of miles, it was easy to be charmed by the way his blue eyes lit up describing a new planet with three distinct rings, or the misshapen moon they’d briefly landed on.

 

Yuuri completed the algorithm, submitted his theory. Graduation loomed and assignments arrived. Central command parked him and Phichit together on a space station outside of the solar system, the biggest of its kind, and to celebrate Phichit took Yuuri out with at least a dozen other cadets for drinks. “Yuuri.” Phichit stopped in the middle of the street, one hand uplifted as though making a very important point. “I just want you to know that I resent the implication that you think I indicated a preference for a space station assignment just because the Agape-class ones allow pets.”

 

“Well, Phichit, did you?” It is not lost on Yuuri that _Destiny_ is an Agape-class station, that it’s equipped with an entire artificially-lit biopark. There’s a human population there that approaches that of some of the colonies; a gravity implementation that mirrors Earth, a marketplace for goods. It’s not quite as big as home, but it’s still the sort of place were thousands of people live and work, a kind of floating city in the stars.

 

“I’ll have you know I had a very sophisticated scoring system.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“The pet policy only constituted 25%.”

 

 

* * *

 

It takes three days to make the trip out to the station, time Yuuri and Phichit spend bunking up in a cramped transport ship that’s only bringing four of them, total, to the station. The rest of its hold has been reserved for cargo: fresh supplies for the bio-park, food, equipment. On the third day, Yuuri follows Phichit to the bridge, where he can watch a little spec of distant, dim silver get brighter and brighter until they can make out the details of _Destiny_ from the flood-lights. They approach, park, get a thorough talking to by a red-head from the security squad, and are each shown to separate quarters in the residential zone.

 

Yuuri hasn’t had a room to himself like this for years. He fiddles with the wall panels while he waits; sets the video screen to rotate between a bamboo forest and the outside sky, dark but brilliant with stars. He sits there for less than fifteen minutes, alone, quiet, before nervous, anxious energy co-opts the controls and sends him out of his quarters to look for the lab.

 

It’s in the lab, months later, after life on board Destiny has settled into something almost like a routine, when Phichit relays the call from his place in communications, and then passes it on with instructions that interrupt Yuuri in the lab. Interruptions are a part of his routine; in spite of every best effort, there are a lot of unknowns in space, a lot of little emergencies that constantly shuffle his time.

 

He does not understand this moment for what it is, for the way the universe still plays at dice. Yuuri understands dark matter and string theory and it hasn’t occurred to him to ever inspect the other forces, the infinite permutations that allow for two people to actually meet in the same epoch of history, the same time, the same space. “Code green, Yuuri,” Phichit says, and Yuuri can already tell this isn’t one of his pranks, although it really ought to be. Not once have they ever called in a code green. It’s a containment procedure that’s been on the books since the inception of the fleet, isolation measures meant to be undertaken on the event that a crew member’s accidentally exposed to other lifeforms. Mostly it involves a lot of tests and a significant amount of time spent in an isolation chamber, the kind of policy that screams _better safe than sorry._

 

There has never been a code green called because, in these years of exploring beyond the solar system, they’ve yet to discover another planet actively sustaining life, even amidst the ones with all of the right elements.

 

Yuuri is the one who wrote the navigation algorithm meant to help them do it and now Phichit’s on the line, trying to tell him something that will change everything about the rest of his life.

 

“Yuuri, it’s _Terra Incognita._ Giacometti’s bringing the ship in now.”

 

“Christophe Giacometti isn’t the pilot of the _Terra Incognita_ ,” Yuuri murmurs, at a great distance from himself and from current reality. It’s a little dangerous and a little dissociative, the way he falls out of his own headspace, sometimes, the way he observes his own body like he’s an outsider.

 

Phichit’s voice is gentler than it has any right to be. “I know, Yuuri.”

 

There is one inevitable conclusion: Victor Nikiforov is the one in containment.


	4. four: the empty spaces in between

_**Day Four.** the empty spaces in-between - cosmic latte or endless void, either way the emptiness is far more vast than the pinpricks that punctuate it. what drifts in the dark?_

_The whole world_   
_Is built on_   
_Two words:_

_"What if?"_

\- David Jones, _Love and Space Dust_

 

**_Terra Incognita_ Ship’s Log, SD.2251.42, Recorded by Captain Victor Nikiforov**

 

“Hi again. I drew the short straw again for the pleasure of sitting here talking into the camera for today’s update. You will have already heard that we’ve changed course this week. Previously we’d been assigned to investigate TRAPPIST-1, but last week we were given a new navigation algorithm from central command that seems to suggest that, although there are planets in the habitable zone, they’re likely too influenced by solar flares to truly sustain life. Certainly the magnetic fields necessary will pose a challenge. I’ve had a chance this week to review the Katsuki theorem in full and it’s marvelous work: a functioning probability array based off of all of our latest probe data in addition to a filtering mechanism to take into account things like radiation, age, tidal lock, impact events, metallicity, et cetera. I suppose I’m preaching to the choir, aren’t I? Everyone who listens to these logs already knows about the theorem’s contribution to astrophysics. I’m excited to road-test it.

 

From earth’s perspective, we are bound for the constellation Draco. Of course once you’re in space you realize quite quickly that constellations themselves are a rather silly concept; hundreds of light years separate the stars which, from earth, seem to be transiting the universe in the shape of a giant beast. When we arrive, no doubt we will stand on surfaces there, and look up at the night sky, and draw shapes of constellations that include our own sun.

 

I’ve been told after my last filing to stop waxing poetic about the nature of space, so here’s today’s routine details: the engine checklists are all green; each of the shuttles passed inspection again; we’re planning on completing this trip and then setting a course for _Destiny_ for refueling the core in about a month’s time afterwards. Biometrics for all crew indicate we’re healthy and stable, for which we send our regards to the healthiest, most boring freeze-dyed diet ever invented by man and our thanks to our fearless leader and his terrifying fitness routine. Honestly, consider it: I am recording this message from the far reaches of space, and yet we don’t have the technology to transport a box of strawberries. Consider it.

 

In other news, Christophe and I wanted to start a mustache contest on board while we’re traveling in subspace to pass the time.

 

Commander Feltsman issued a strict veto. I don’t think it was very sporting, personally.”

 

* * *

 

**_Terra Incognita_ Ship’s Log, SD.2251.43, Recorded by Commander Yakov Feltsman**

 

“… And also, in regards to yesterday’s Ship’s Log, I would only like to mention _again_ that Central Command made the decision to promote Captain Nikiforov much, much too soon. Instead of strawberries, consider headache remedies.”

 

* * *

 

**_Terra Incognita_ Ship’s Log, SD.2252.49.6, Recorded by Commander Yakov Feltsman**

 

“We are working on our plans to conduct a landing on Kepler 296-e. You will have seen in yesterday’s ship log the results of the atmospheric analysis that we completed yesterday. Included in my report are the customary maintenance inspections; all systems and shuttles passed and are in good shape. The landing party will consist of a shuttle crew of six led by Captain Nikiforov and Lieutenant Nekola. I’m putting their names and registration numbers on screen now.

 

Our initial exploration is scheduled for three hours in the landing zone Lieutenant Giacometti has identified in the initial scans. Based on the atmospheric data, we will be using light exo-gear. Weather volatility is currently a concern, so today we expect to work on the evacuation protocol.

 

All crew are in good health. We will record ship’s logs hourly henceforth in keeping with landing party protocol.”

 

* * *

 

**_Terra Incognita_ Ship’s Log, SD.2252.50.9, Recorded by Lieutenant Christophe Giacometti**

 

“I have been instructed by Commander Feltsman to initiate a Code Green after an incident during our landing expedition. Captain Victor Nikiforov has been placed in isolation in the ship’s hold and will be under continuous surveillance in keeping with the protocol. The Captain is conscious, and not badly injured, and his initial medical scans did not seem to indicate any severe complications from his accident. He and the rest of the landing crew will provide eye-witness accounts as soon as the Commander finishes their de-briefing. As for myself, I am plotting an emergency course for the space station _Destiny,_ which will bring us there much sooner than anticipated. We do not expect Captain Nikiforov to be in need of medical care at the time, but we will send additional transmissions if his conditions change. I have not seen or spoken with him yet, but I’m led to understand that he’s broken an arm, and that his exo-suit was pierced during a fall. As far as I can tell, he seems to have come into contact with some kind of algae, and we are keeping the contaminated suit along with samples in isolation with him. More to come in this evening’s full log; we are departing immediately.”

 

* * *

 

**_Terra Incognita_ Special Isolation Log, SD.2252.50.9**

 

Victor Nikiforov is deposited into an isolation chamber on the _Terra Incognita_ by one of the rover robots and promptly left there by the machine; seals fit themselves into place until he’s airlocked and alone there. Several robotic arms, manipulated by other members of the crew, help to remove his exo-suit and store it in a special case, which receives special chemical treatment. “This is going to be uncomfortable,” warns a voice over the loudspeaker, apologetic, and Victor grits his teeth and shouts Russian expletives as the machinery tends to his injuries — sets his arm in short order, and then stitches up a gash along his leg. It’s ugly work. He’ll probably have a scar. There are small bruises on other parts of his body, but a bio-scan deems these lesser concerns.

 

Commander Feltsman’s voice is heard next. It’s uncharacteristically gentle. “Vitya,” he says. “Tell us what happened.”

 

“It was just a fall, I’m fine …” Victor complains. Yakov’s silence persists, so he exhales, explains. “We landed, took off with the rovers and the scanners, and started collecting samples — dirt cores, a little bit of liquid. I guess I’ll have lots of time to talk about what it looks like down there, if I’m going to be stuck here … Anyway, moving away from the shore at the landing site led us up this strange geographic feature, greenish cliffs, oxidized maybe, and when we got closer we noticed this strange, springy stuff everywhere. Moss or lichen or something. Incredible, right? Yakov, I think we found plants!”

 

“The story, Victor.”

 

“Ugh, fine. So we climb up, to get a better view, and I take six steps forward and the next thing I know I’m plummeting through a cave-in; turns out the entire feature we’ve been thinking is some kind of tangible stone formation is actually _made_ of this stuff and it just gave way to an underground liquid system. Or maybe not underground. I think I fell through the lung of a giant plant. That’s the only way I can explain it. Must have been a twenty foot fall through the strangest vascular system I’ve ever seen. If that’s even what it was. The ground down _there_ is plenty stable, considering it busted through my suit when I hit bottom. Yakov! Who’s working on the samples? We have to name it. I think Emil took some scrapings for an inspection, when we go back we should …”

 

“Christophe is piloting us back to _Destiny_ in keeping with protocol right now,” Yakov reminds him pointedly. Victor visibly deflates on screen. “We’re not going back any time soon.”

 

Without the high of the discovery to keep him occupied, he seems to finally acknowledge his own pain. “No medications, either, then?”

 

“Not unless you’re dying. They told me you splashed into the liquid down there; we can’t risk an interaction. Emil’s analyzing the samples. We’ll be monitoring your diet.”

 

Captain Nikiforov resigns himself to fate. “Fine.”

 

* * *

 

**_Terra Incognita_ Special Isolation Log, SD.2252.51.15**

 

Captain Victor Nikiforov inspects the wound on his leg, frowning at the stitches. Then he looks up at the camera. “Call medical,” he grunts.

 

* * *

 

**_Terra Incognita_ Ship’s Log, SD.2252.52, Recorded by Lieutenant Emil Nekola**

 

“We’ve had what you call an exciting few days. Before I talk about that: system statuses are still green; shuttles passed inspection; all crew are mostly healthy, save one. We’ll talk about Captain Victor Nikiforov in a bit. I’ve been in the lab working on our core samples; I’ve attached the geologic findings for your perusal. Nikiforov is still in isolation; turns out the contamination protocols are working perfectly, since evidently he _is_ contaminated. Medical’s discovered some kind of substance on that cut he got after his fall, and they’re having a field day trying to figure out how to contain its growth. Anyway, we’ve got the auto-doc picking out tiny little green bits and then recording them as samples for the lab back on the station, and Sara’s sent some notes ahead to _Destiny_ about possible suggestions for things she thinks she can do to get rid of it.

 

How do I know that Victor’s still in good spirits in spite of this development, you may well ask. Answer: because Christophe tells me that he keeps whining about how the whole experience is going to leave a scar, and he’s already got a list of forty-two suggested names for whatever it was that he fell through on the surface using the five different languages he’s fluent in. Show-off.”

 

* * *

 

 _Terra Incognita_ arrives at _Destiny_ on SD 2252.63. Victor Nikiforov is put into the containment room in the laboratory.

 

He and Yuuri Katsuki are separated now by only a single pane of unbreakable glass.


	5. five: supernovae

_**Day Five.** supernovae - oh, my dear, you know how to go out with a bang, don’t you? i promise you, your swan song will be seen across the ages._

 

 _I loved you as  
Icarus loved   
The sun -  
  
Too close,  
Too much.  
  
  
_\- David Jones,  _Love and Space Dust_

 

  
Yuuri Katsuki finds himself around the corner from the main entrance to the _Destiny_ labs, crouched against a wall, counting his breaths as he relays a story to Phichit through the pop-up video connection on the band around his wrist. “… So I said _hello, I’m Yuuri Katsuki, one of the scientists stationed here,_ and then he said _Katsuki? Like the Katsuki Theorem?_ And then I said _sorry, I left my commlink in my quarters_ and fled.”

 

Phichit doesn’t even seem to be _trying_ to look sympathetic. If anything, he seems to be attempting to hold back laughter, and mostly failing, unable to contain a wide, cheshire grin. “You did not.”

 

“I did. And you know what’s worse?”

 

“You were wearing your commlink.”

 

Phichit knows him so well. Yuuri groans, and puts his head in his hands. “I was wearing my commlink.”

 

What follows is a two-minute pep-talk from Phichit Chulanont, and Yuuri knows he can’t avoid the lab forever, so eventually he resigns himself to fate and walks back in. Captain Victor Nikiforov is still on the other side of the glass, and he watches Yuuri carefully and curiously, eyes supernova-bright. “Like the Katsuki Theorem,” Yuuri confirms.

 

Victor flashes a heart-shaped smile that Yuuri wagers does statistically significant things to his resting heart rate. “Your work is brilliant,” he says, and Yuuri reminds himself that he doesn’t really believe in heaven and that he doesn’t tend to have lucid, realer-than-real dreams. This is his reality now. He has to learn to live in it. Learning to live with it also means learning to live with visits from the _Terra Incognita_ crew, including a boisterous Christophe Giacometti, who laughs a little too loudly when he realizes that the green fuzz around Victor’s gash keeps coming back. It’s the kind of thing Yuuri would resent if he didn’t read the effort in Christophe’s eyes, the way he’s trying hard to keep his friend in good spirits, the way they both won’t admit this could be serious.

 

“Came all this way from Mars, Victor, and you’re turning into the world’s first hybrid extraterrestrial-human houseplant.”

 

Yuuri does not say that the samples remind him more of watermeal; he’s already seen the recordings from the Kepler mission, and in one of his test tubes, the little green sphere has grown a tiny tendril into the sample soil and seems to be re-arranging itself in the manner Victor described.

 

“ _Space_ plant,” Victor corrects, while the auto-doc attends, again, to his leg. Yuuri has six different samples growing in test tubes at his station under various atmospheric conditions and inputs. He’s prone to thinking about worst-case scenarios; about how, in past centuries, some macabre demon in the guise of a doctor would have already suggested leeches or amputation. Then he looks up at Christophe, turns to where he knows Yuuri is looking, and flashes a grin and a wink. “It’s good to know I’m delicious,” he says, and Christophe has to pat Yuuri on his shoulder as he spits out his drink.

 

* * *

 

 _Terra Incognita_ receives new orders to return to Kepler 296-e, arranges for an exchange of pilots with the mining operation _Castle;_ Christophe comes to give Victor the bad news. To say Victor takes it poorly is an understatement. “Leroy? _Jean-Jacques Leroy?”_ He scoffs and paces the corners of the isolation room, sulks. “You make sure he treats her right, Chris. I’m going to read every single one of the ship’s inspection longs when you get back.”

 

“Don’t you worry.” Christophe’s grin is all teeth. “I think I can make sure he doesn’t get too comfortable.”

 

In his absence, Victor becomes a restless, wounded thing. Yuuri’s shifts end, and he finishes them more often than not sitting back to back with Victor and the pane of glass, talking about science and space and all the little things until he nearly misses dinner in the cantina. Victor’s hair gets longer, and the bags under his eyes get bigger, and he finally admits to Yuuri, weeks later, alone in the lab, that he’s having trouble sleeping. “I get why it’s so sterile in here,” he says, as they sit in the same formation, back to back on either side of the glass. “… And I’m trying to be a good sport. But I feel like I’m in a zoo, and I’ve got nothing to do …”

 

“Hang on,” whispers Yuuri, and even though he knows it’s a complete violation of regulations, he comes back twenty minutes later with his comforter and pillow, and a tablet with the book he’s been re-reading. Victor stares at him with wide eyes as Yuuri turns it on, the brilliance of the screen illuminating his face in the dark of the lab, and then starts to read:

 

_… And amid all the splendours of the World, its vast halls and spaces, and its wheeling fires, Ilúvatar chose a place for their habitation in the Deeps of Time and in the midst of the innumerable stars …_

 

“The Silmarillion?”

 

Yuuri pauses. “You know it?”

 

Victor looks at him from the cot in the isolation chamber, smiles subtly in the dark. It isn’t the sunlit glow of his heart-shaped smile; in the shadows he’s stripped of artifice, down to his core elements. “I do.”

 

It becomes a tradition; Yuuri reads astrophysics treatises, accounts of the first Mars landing, the Hitchhiker’s Guide. He tells himself that he’s just being kind, that Victor’s the first person to ever be in this situation, that he deserves basic human decency. It certainly isn’t because he’s getting used to Victor’s expectant gaze, or addicted to the way his expression softens, the way he stills and settles into himself.

 

He does not realize that Victor sees it the other way around from the other side of the glass, that Yuuri is gathering gas and elements and heat, that he too is becoming more and more of himself.

 

The mere existence of Victor makes him braver. Yuuri reads him poetry; tells Victor _You raised your hand to your face as if to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light streamed straight to the bone, as if you were the small room closed in glass with every speck of dust illuminated._

 

He is not sure which one of them he’s thinking of anymore when he reads: _The light is no mystery. The mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through._

 

* * *

 

“I have an idea for how to get rid of it,” Yuuri says. _It’s dangerous,_ he does not say, although Victor can read it, plain as sunrise, on his face.

 

“I trust you,” Victor replies, because there is no universe he can imagine where he wouldn’t.

 

* * *

 

Victor’s subsequent release from isolation becomes a topic for breakfast with Phichit. “Yuuri. Just ask him over already.”

 

“He’s just being nice to me while he gets back into shape,” Yuuri protests. He’s spent his off-day in the bio-ring of the station with Victor, who’d insisted on making the full two-mile loop through the botanic gardens. “The Isolation chamber’s pretty small and it’ll be a long time before _Terra Incognita’s_ back for him to resume active duty.”

 

“Uh-huh,” says Phichit, whose verbal agreement indicates he is nonetheless not convinced. “You’re raising crazy spaceplants together.”

 

“He’s a very curious person!”

 

“Uh-huh.” The two syllables have never sounded more skeptical, and when Yuuri’s comm-link beeps and briefly flashes Victor’s name, Phichit nudges him under the table. “Go on,” he says, and makes kissy-faces. “The sooner you admit you’re actually dating the sooner you can get to the good stuff.”

 

Yuuri doesn’t say what he thinks, which is that there’s no way someone like Victor Nikiforov could possibly be that interested in him. Victor’s stellar luminosity is off the charts; Yuuri, by comparison, is the bleak surface of a traveling comet drawn in by gravity, briefly warmed by a trip through his aura.

 

Comets are never so lucky as to be allowed to stay. They’ve finished another one of those two-mile runs, and Victor is fond as he brushes Yuuri’s sweaty bangs out of his face. Yuuri thinks he must look like rust and space junk, spotchy and ruined with sweat; Victor looks as flawless as ever, even if his hair is right on the edge of command-approved length. The path here is narrow, and for once they’re alone, surrounded only by the trees. Victor’s gaze is soft, and Yuuri thinks it would be so easy to just grab a fistful of his jacket, stand up on his tiptoes, bridge this last little bit of distance between them.

 

He almost does it. An announcement comes over the loudspeakers and shakes him out of reverie, shatters the moment like an asteroid on entry.

 

**_All Pilots, please report to the Flight Squadron for a short briefing. This is not a drill. All Pilots, please report …_ **

 

* * *

 

It’s an emergency operation to get a shuttle out to Madonna-Class freighter _Castle_ after the ship reports come in nothing that several crew members have come down with inexplicable arrhythmia and that more than one of their navigation systems is offline. Victor volunteers, because of course he does.Everyone knows he’s the best pilot on board, the one with the highest chance of success of managing a manual subspace transit to bring the freighter back to _Destiny_ safe and sound.

 

 _See you soon,_ Victor says when he leaves, walking backwards up the shuttle ramp, like he either can’t take his eyes off of Yuuri, or won’t.

 

Yuuri always imagines the worst. _Stop,_ he tells himself. Except his anxiety often takes the wheel, and though he’s never been afraid of his own ending he realizes with sudden, abject terror that he’s very much afraid of Victor’s.

 

Every time he thinks the word he hates himself for it. Every time, anxiety explodes in his brain, rattles his being with all of the force of a dying star.

 

_Goodbye._


	6. six: black holes & dwarf stars

_**Day Six.** black holes / dwarf stars - settle down into oblivion, whether it be a catastrophic fall or the long, slow way down. consume, or shine. either way, this is the end._

 

 _I dared to believe_  
 _That we could_  
 _Last forever,_  
 _When even_  
 _The brightest stars_  
 _Must fade_  
 _In the end.  
  
  
_ \- David Jones,  _Love and Space Dust_

 

When Victor is deposited into the Isolation Chamber at the _Destiny_ lab, he resolves to be a pragmatist. He records a finer-grain description of the planet and their brief expedition, prior to his accident, and he accesses the ship’s computer on the wall to read through the initial reports from the lab. It’s a strategy that works for all of three hours and twelve minutes before boredom kicks in. Two of the techs won’t even speak to him and the third? The third is Yuuri Katsuki, who is evidently the author of the most elegant piece of astrophysics and probability Victor recalls reading in recent years, and he’s a voracious reader. There’s not much else to do on a ship, after all, passing time on long hauls through subspace, and Christophe Giacometti can only invent so many variations of strip poker before the game grows old.

 

Katsuki speaks softly. He’s shy, unassuming, self-deprecating. Victor realizes immediately that he’s utterly unaware of his own brilliance.

 

For a week or so, Chris is around to keep his spirits high. Victor cracks jokes with the _Destiny_ crew. During the primary shifts he’s got something to keep himself occupied. But when work ends, reality kicks in. He’s alone in a ten by ten room; he’s got some kind of symbiotic algae-creature repeatedly attempting to craft a home in his leg.

 

He sleeps uneasily, perhaps because he dreams that at the end of this process he will get the worst news, learning that he’s unfit for duty, that they’re sending him back to Mir II. It’s only slightly less of a dead-end than this room. Maybe that’s what prompts him to admit to Yuuri that he feels little better than the specimens the scientists keep experimenting on, except here he serves no purpose. He exists on the other side of several glass walls; he’s in a space made entirely for voyeurism.

 

He has no privacy.

 

He admits this, and Yuuri leaves, but when Yuuri returns, he’s got a comforter and a pillow, and it changes everything.

 

By the second night, before Victor drifts off to sleep listening to Yuuri reading Feynman lectures, something formless takes shape in Victor’s mind. He does not think he would mind it if …

 

* * *

 

Gradually, piece by piece, Victor assembles a picture of who Yuuri is.

 

And gradually, piece by piece, Yuuri devises the series of procedures that finally rid him of his hitch-hiking plant problem, although there’s now three of the little beasts growing in a terrarium on Yuuri’s desk. Once cleared by medical, Victor’s assigned real, albeit temporary quarters — his own bed, and a customizable set of walls that project different images. It’s a relief to sleep there, the first night, and also a regret, because he’s had to say goodbye to Yuuri at the intersection of hallways that make up all the different quarters of _Destiny_ ’s many crew.

 

 _Let’s do a book club, at least,_ he messages Yuuri via the ship’s communication system, not four minutes into his night alone. Yuuri responds immediately with recommendations. Victor can’t help but smile.On their runs together, he learns that Yuuri is a proper scientist, that he both admires and is scandalized by the way Victor strides out into a waiting universe. He learns that Yuuri is empirical and orderly about his work; that he is perceptive about everything except for himself. Yuuri has written an equation that will last for decades; Victor’s already hearing rumors that there’s a new upstart at the academy eager to chase down his own records. More than once, Yuuri implies that Victor’s better than he is, smarter or more talented, maybe, and the process to figure out how to weave around his self-delusions to get to the heart of the matter is harder than any of the training Victor’s ever done in flight school.

 

Yuuri’s a terrific runner. The weather systems for the loop they’ve selected keep the place warm and a little humid, and in places the trail is narrow from foliage. Victor catches himself watching Yuuri’s calves, or the way his muscles shift underneath his shirt. After another week, he knows the way well enough to take the lead, and glances back sometimes to catch Yuuri’s eyes on him. Most of the time Yuuri flushes slightly, and diverts his eyes to the passing trees. Sometimes, though, he holds Victor’s gaze, and between them passes an understanding that Victor’s not quite yet ready to comprehend.

 

Victor’s told Yuuri more stories about growing up on Mir II than he’s ever shared with anyone, including Christophe, both the good and the bad. He’s learned the way Yuuri smiles softly when he’s pleased, and the determination he gets when he’s working on something particularly challenging, and the sweet little blush that forms a delicate span over the bridge of his nose and the tips of his ears when Victor praises him. Victor’s just done so now, because Yuuri’s outpaced him for the second day in a row, and mostly because he wants to see the quiet glow in Yuuri’s eyes, he brushes back Yuuri’s bangs that need to be trimmed. For a moment, Victor’s fingers feel the way magnets look, the way surface tension works; he’s not sure why he hasn’t touched Yuuri more often, or if he even needs to ask —

 

— and then the ship’s broadcast system shatters the possibility of what might have turned into a kiss, in the earliest phases of his inception.

 

Later, Victor stands on the deck of a shuttle, watching Yuuri, who is watching him. The door is closing. There’s something he ought to say.

 

He figures out what it is after he’s put in the coordinates for _Castle,_ after he zips away at light speed.

 

 _Oh,_ Victor thinks. It is his job to discover planets and lifeforms but he’s never learned this about himself: _I love him._

 

* * *

 

When he arrives at _Castle,_ he discovers a barely salvageable ship. Among the sturdiest of its crew is a man named Nishigori, who tells Victor they were caught by a strange, magnetic storm and that there’s a radiation leak, and half the computer systems are down. Victor pours over the readouts, calculates at least three potential hairline breaches in the hull that might be responsible for some of the crew’s current state, re-arranges them to accommodate.

 

“The subspace calculator’s down,” Nishigori informs him, coughing as he sits nearby. “We re-routed some of the backup power to the manual coordinate system instead, but …”

 

“I’ll calculate it,” Victor says. He hasn’t had to do this since his years at the academy, but he’s Victor Nikiforov. “How far will the engine reserves take us?”

 

“Not far enough.”

 

“Get me the charts for the three star systems nearest _Destiny_.” Victor puts on his most confident smile. At the academy, he learned that pretending was always half the battle. There’s no part of this plan that he doesn’t hate, but Nishigori doesn’t need to know that. “We’ll make a pit stop.”

 

He waits until it’s very late, and the bridge is empty, to record a ship’s log.

 

**_Castle_ Ship’s Log, SD.2253.09, Recorded by Captain Victor Nikiforov**

 

“Almost all of Castle’s primary navigation systems and a significant amount of its primary power have been negatively impacted by a magnetic storm. Evidence in the technical readouts suggest that minor weaknesses in the hull have contributed to the developing sickness in the crew. According to my calculations, it will be nearly impossible to travel all the way back to _Destiny_ with the ship in such a state, and rather than risk a system shutdown, I’m authorizing a variation of Protocol 142. I will manually pilot the craft back to the Proxima Centauri system, and assist in an evacuation of _Castle’s_ crew members by shuttle onto Proxima Centauri b. I strongly recommend Central Command authorize at least two interceptors to escort the crew from there back to _Destiny_ for proper care; in addition, if mining is to continue in this region, it will be necessary to send another freighter or a major outfit for repairs, although I don’t recommend doing so until an Expedition ship has cleared the area for any potential hazards.

 

In my estimation, it is more than somewhat unlikely that _Castle_ will be functional after the journey. As the ranking officer onboard is currently severely ill, I will be the last to depart.”

 

He pauses for a very long time. And then he says this: “Captain Victor Nikiforov, out.”

 

Nearly two whole months with Yuuri and he never once said what really mattered. He has been caught in the assumption that no matter how far he travels, there is still a day on the horizon where he can return to the quiet warmth that Yuuri radiates, that he controls his destiny as he moves through space, and that as far as time is concerned there will always be more of it.

 

There's a non-trivial chance that it's the last mistake he'll ever make. Victor resolves that if he survives this, it won't ever happen again. 

 

 

* * *

 

Three days later, the Madonna-class freighter _Castle_ emerges into the Proxima Centauri system outside of Proxima Centauri b’s dust clouds; stays in their orbit long enough to deploy all of its crew to wait on the planet’s surface for pick-up through shuttlecraft.

 

The pilot is the last to leave, taking off in an escape pod before the storm of rocks shatters the bridge.


	7. seven: the unknown

_**Day Seven.** the unknown - what lies untouched, unknown, unseen?_

 

 _And I could  
Never tell  
Whether you  
Were the dawn  
Or the dusk:  
  
The beginning  
Or the end.  
  
  
_\- David Jones,  _Love and Space Dust_

 

The first thing Victor Nikiforov does when he wakes in the infirmary bay — not the half-wakefulness he exhibited while being treated for exposure, not the twitches and ramblings of a man on several different medications — when he _really wakes_ — is to ask for Yuuri. He learns Yuuri has been with him as frequently as his shifts on deck will allow, even, sometimes, when the innocent-faced med-tech — Lieutenant Ji — thinks he really ought to be in his own quarters, asleep.

 

If Guang Hong thinks it’s ridiculous to summon Yuuri from the bridge now, he’s hidden it behind a pleasant, innocuous smile, and the kind of bedside manner Victor never got to observe in any of the medics he grew up with on the Mars colony. Afterwards, Yuuri’s arrival is swift; he bursts through the doorframe in such a rush that he nearly stumbles on its seams. Victor reaches for him. Guang Hong pretends to be preoccupied with the computer on the wall, fiddling with Victor’s electronic chart. His observing — or lack thereof — does not change the outcome. As soon as Yuuri’s standing next to the bed, Victor sits up properly, pulls on the lapels of Yuuri’s uniform, and kisses him.

 

Victor thinks he will cherish Yuuri’s subtle gasp of surprise for the rest of his life.

 

After that initial second of shock, Yuuri cups his face, thumb brushing over Victor’s cheekbone. The kiss is slow and gentle, and when it ends, Yuuri tilts his forehead against Victor’s, carefully twines his arms over Victor’s shoulder. He says nothing and still somehow Victor knows what it is that Yuuri’s doing: he’s listening to the subtle pulse of Victor’s heartbeat on the monitors, and synchronizing their breath.

 

Victor has been abandoned, jettisoned on an escape pod to a place of unforgiving extremes, he’s been gassed and freezing cold, and he still thinks there’s not a greater pain than the simple fact of how much he loves this man: _there_ is a force that will really break him open, boil his blood, carve out his insides. Shattering is never a good thing in space, but if there was a moment that he could have chosen something else, Victor’s not sure exactly when it was. He must have raced past that event horizon a long time ago. Events must have been set in motion the moment they stood on opposite sides of that glass wall, and from thence, the universe unfolded exactly as it should.

 

 

* * *

 

“You know,” says Victor, very quietly, murmuring the words into the crown of Yuuri’s head, “I kept thinking that I was going to die, and the last time I saw you was really going to be the last time …”

 

They’re in Yuuri’s quarters, which is the last in a string of miracles stretching back for longer than Victor cares to remember. Yuuri is in his arms, languid and at ease in a way that Victor has hardly ever gotten to see. Victor’s been cleared from the infirmary for just a handful of hours, time Victor’s convinced Yuuri to let him make the most of, albeit carefully. Those slow, soft kisses are incredibly intimate, and maybe they’re the reason Victor’s letting himself talk about the absolute discomfort of life in an escape pod, facing the kind of death everyone from the academy gets warned about in survival training.

 

Yuuri huffs air: something like a bitter, brutal laugh. “I’m the one who always thinks the worst,” he reminds Victor, sliding his hands along Victor’s sides. Their first kiss seems to have given Yuuri permission to touch him now, and Yuuri keeps doing it, outlining Victor’s frame with his hands, reassuring himself of Victor’s presence. “But I thought I owed it to you to … to at least find out for sure. I insisted I’d accompany the transit shuttles, and when we got there I calculated all the possible escape trajectories from the last ping from _Castle’s_ systems.” Yuuri does not explain that in two of his scenarios, the pod crashed into ice fields, and in six more it took damage from the orbiting dust clouds. He is a brilliant mathematician, and Victor likely knows he thought of the odds. They weren’t objectively the worst for survival, all things considered; Victor’s too clever for that. Still: it doesn’t mean he didn’t imagine it, Victor dying alone in a burst of light, burning up in the atmosphere after one final act of brilliance. “And I told myself that if you were okay, I’d … I’d make sure you know how much you mean to me.”

 

Victor can’t help himself; he smiles, nuzzles Yuuri’s jaw. “… Go on.”

 

Yuuri reminds himself there’s no reason to be short of breath. The atmosphere systems on _Destiny_ provide purer air than earth can offer. “I’ve admired you for a long time,” he admits, which is true. The catch of his breath and the flutter of his heartbeat are things he has Victor to blame for; Victor and no one else. “I’m not always good with my feelings, Victor,but … You’re the first person I’ve wanted to hold onto.”

 

Victor kisses the rest of the confession as it falls from Yuuri’s lips, and then he smiles gently: “Me too, Yuuri.” He admires Yuuri’s kindness, and Yuuri’s mind, and the way the light plays with the soft curves of his face.

 

It takes a very long time before one of them will ask: _but what do you think would have happened, if …_

 

Victor is a Russian who grew up on the Mars, who keeps an old icon from a long-abandoned religion inside the cockpit because his grandfather keeps insisting it will bring him good luck; Yuuri is a scientist, who nonetheless wears his sister’s mala beads sometimes around his wrist as a reminder of home, who touches them whenever he’s deep in thought. The wall screen of his room is transparent now, playing the infinite blackness of the space between the stars as _Destiny_ glides between systems. Tomorrow or the day after, weeks, months, will bring Victor another mission in some other place, more variables than even an engineer of Yuuri’s calibre can anticipate. “Conservation of energy,” Yuuri hums, while they both think about it. It’s easier to say it now, when he’s content inside of the circle of Victor’s arms; it’d been nigh impossible to contemplate until they located Victor’s pod. “Nothing in the universe is ever really unmade.”

 

Victor could challenge with the forces of entropy, could remind him of all the ways this ship might fall apart as it hurtles through the emptiness of space. He doesn’t. Instead, he does something more important. He watches Yuuri’s eyes flutter closed, counts the rise and fall of his breath.

 

The ship’s announcement system chirps to alert them they’re making an adjustment, that _Destiny_ in its own way will head slowly towards a neighboring solar system, steadily drifting through unexplored space. Victor calculates a different course, a more personal one. Looking at Yuuri, he thinks, for the first time, that perhaps he’d enjoy a life spent in orbit.

 

Mir II hasn’t been home for a long time, but maybe this could be.

 

* * *

 

"Humans are just love and stardust," says Yuuri.

 

"Not _just_ ," says Victor. The difference matters. He’s been dreaming again of other lives, other eras, other places where he’s known Yuuri’s name.

 

Outside their window there is a hell of a universe, and they’ve got nothing but time.


End file.
